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The problem is a reasonable limit depends on the combination of weather, traffic, driver, and vehicle conditions.

Someone in a more nimble car with great breaks and plenty of alternate route windows who knows the road well may be able to safely do 75-80 mph. At the same time even the most professional trucker with a loaded rig probably can't do more than 70 mph safely, and they'd have to have even more free space or highly predictable traffic around them.

Then there are adverse conditions; dense traffic, high winds, dust storms, mirror-like water after a rainstorm with bright sun, even black ice.

As a driver I feel that there should only be 'speed advisories' which tell what the lowest-common consumer denominator car should be able to safely do; and maybe in cases where there is some inherent limit due to blind corners or other design failures a literal speed /limit/ above which the driver could not safely know about future conditions in time to react (say 3-4 seconds).

Yeah, and things will just be super-good when you use an alternative communication model based around pre-shared one time pads (lots of data) or one time keys with say AES256 on a nicely minimal redundancy audio codec.

Even if you do have a targeted list of subjects to monitor the only information that you are assured are the two endpoints of that particular connection.

The regulation gains little of substantial value; aside from what stupid criminals provide. Anyone I should actually be worried about will already be using more advanced methods.

Yes, SMS is a silly basic network feature that happens to also occasionally carry messages for the user instead of just phone network data.

That doesn't change the fact that it would probably only take a minor change in tower hardware to have it relay the same message to each connected phone in the case of an emergency. Which would also be a great way of notifying all affected users that emergency services calls could disrupt regular service.

The first three are why an official, but realistically priced (very extreme marginal profit per sale) business model will work.

Users will know exactly where to go and be directed by search engines to, the highest quality and fastest methods of obtaining the content they desire; the ready access to them will satisfy the convenience factor as well.

Value is attained by the small marginal profit; it simply wouldn't be cost effective to infringe on the copyright (which is why it wouldn't even be necessary for that kind of restriction; merely the competing service provider perspective).

The main reason to buy at all would be a shared community experience, and the network effect of connecting with both the fans and creators of the content. Your input may even help shape the course of events as it provides another perspective to those creating the story.

The first three are why an official, but realistically priced (very extreme marginal profit per sale) business model will work.

Users will know exactly where to go and be directed by search engines to, the highest quality and fastest methods of obtaining the content they desire; the ready access to them will satisfy the convenience factor as well.

Value is attained by the small marginal profit; it simply wouldn't be cost effective to infringe on the copyright (which is why it wouldn't even be necessary for that kind of restriction; merely the competing service provider perspective).

The main reason to buy at all would be a shared community experience, and the network effect of connecting with both the fans and creators of the content. Your input may even help shape the course of events as it provides another perspective to those creating the story.

I agree, for a LICENSE to the track it's too much. However charing 1 cent (or whatever the most minimal traceable currency unit is) to cover the transaction cost of providing the high grade source and a 'clearsign' style validation that you do indeed have an authenticated copy isn't too much.

Though charging that for each track is a bit much, if you wanted to buy an entire 10-50 track album it would make more sense to have the license work fee be about a base currency unit and then bill something sane for the transfer costs. It probably shouldn't every cost more than 0.05 USD even for a raw ultra-high-grade uncompressed transfer. (As if anyone would want that though; lossless compression is quite possible for such data.)

With some things this makes sense, however there is a solution that's obvious to me. It's probably some financial regulation mis-incentive mucking things up, but I'm surprised I haven't seen something like the following.

Sort of a combination of micro-payments and investing. Instead of funding a project only by corporate interests anyone is free to make an initial 'investment' in the work. When the funding goal is reached production begins; for multi-result units, like songs, videos, or chapter style media investment might be more incremental.

After production of a unit has been funded additional buyers pay less for a copy of it. Likely degrading along a decay curve. Former investors also get a small cut of the 'profit' but it would be too small to waste with fees transferring around.

Instead the 'profit' could only be re-invested in new works, since the investor made a sound decision about what was of value to their community.

For popular works the very first investors would probably get all of their input investment back to use for other projects. After a pre-agreed profit limit is reached the entire work would shift in to promotional mode, the cost only enough at that point to cover distribution.

Dead end works would occur as well, but in those cases the investors would at least receive the work they'd paid for, which should have been at a price they were willing to pay to see said result.

Production houses that fail to deliver the expected quality would also quickly be sorted out and taken care of by the market and network effects.

'investors' would all end up paying similar prices eventually, at least for a given work. (The price would trend like a very flattened bell-curve. Those investing in the middle paying only about what their convenience factor was for seeing the content earlier.)

Additionally the inherent transparency requirement would ensure competition among both production houses and content proposers.

Maybe instead of causing sensational moral panics CNN could actually do some /real/ investigative research and reporting.

I want *accountability*, both from news outlets to the public, AND for the news outlets to do their *job* and actually hold politicians, lobbyists, corporations, and even people accountable for their actions or lack there of.

I want *depth*, don't just report that something happened, tell us why it happened, what impact it has on others, and what sorts of reactions others can and are taking.

I want *discussion*, not 140 character twit-headed sound-bytes, but real comments and summaries of comments compiled in to bin-counts that reflect actual public opinion.

It's even worse than that. The Good stuff might be unable to change facts, such as the names of islands, people, historic event titles; all of which could potentially contain improper language. Even for example factual descriptions of ethnic hate, cleansing, and various barbaric acts committed by the persecuting sides.

The bad stuff meanwhile has the freedom of being completely polymorphic.

White-listing things won't work because there's simply too much and it would overload the system.
Black-listing doesn't work either because you're back to the game of whack-a-mole.

The only way to win the game is to have a real, live, human monitoring the situation in the real world.

I think that by the time 5th or 6th grade rolls around there isn't any information that should be taboo or restricted; it dangerously creates a distorted world view, endangers the child to real world threats via willful enforcement of their ignorance, and doesn't actually stop them from accessing that same information elsewhere.

It's ineffective, harmful, and wasteful of resources; just outright a silly idea.

There are two issues here. First is a quote I'll paraphrase; If you aren't using a web of trust, you aren't using real security. Second is that the current system is centralized. It forces people to trust others because that is easier.

The solution is obviously based on a completely de-centralized system that involves everyone in security. You can trust that your bank's employees hand out the proper certificate on official paper. You can see that it's signed by all of them, and you can inform your browser that it is indeed the signing authority for your money.

The caches would be like current DNS servers at ISPs, middle-men that simply cache the records provided by others. They might even be smart and do some basic sanity checks so they can dump errant records.

The post office should not eliminate Saturday delivery. That is a scarcity that the other services charge more for. Keeping that day actually increases the value of using the post-office.

Where the post-office really needs to compete is with the package services that free/cheep shipping use.

2-3 day delivery is far faster, but my guess is that there is something like a $1-2 difference in cost for a typical package. I however, would typically love to choose the $1-2 option, esp since the packages would then get delivered to the nice LOCKED box instead of my porch.

The only other area that USPS is lacking is the tracking. Consumers don't necessarily need a per-package validation at every step. Merely watching their package getting closer and having a valid expected delivery date is probably sufficient.

The number one reason I mail things at the post office versus using FedEx or UPS IS the Saturday delivery. That is often times the only feature that makes 2-3 day priority mail a better bet time/money wise than just FedEx or UPS.

What the post office really needs to do is compete in the same areas that UPS and FedEx do; really cheep stupidly slow package delivery.

I could see paying a dollar per pound extra to get my package in 4 business days or less instead of the 5-7 it takes UPS or whatever similar slowness it is for FedEx.

While on the subject of features, how about adding one that reduces miss-delivery?

Create a Globally Unique ID for each individual and corporate position in the US. Allow me to change the address at will, with the expectation for mail to follow within the week. Now all my relatives only need send first class mail to one 'address' reference regardless of how often I have to update it. My bills and anyone else that wants to communicate can just mail to that.

Plus as an added bonus, a one time boost to the economy would occur as various mail-product vendors would suddenly have to connect to the online database and query to find the current real-address associated with a target's identifier. A massive upgrade to equipment, or more jobs for those manually looking up addresses.

Just to prevent spammers abusing the system, a bunch of fictitious names and locations should be randomly generated based on invalid entries.

Harry Potter is a successful book series, but what would allow the author to be recognized and paid when the movies are made? The copyrights would likely have been sat on and then the movies made; what would have worked however would be the /trade mark/ on 'Harry Potter'. A similar movie could still have been made, but it wouldn't have been able to use the same name, nor receive the fan support as part of the same author's works. It would have been better for the studio and author to reach an amicable agreement that is mutually beneficial than to skirt around the trade mark.

It would be nice if this was about the various IP types in general, however to preface about copyright:

I think /MOST/ things should be covered by copyright, as long as they are not public works or work paid for by the public.

Patents should be an extreme rarity and independent invention should disprove that it was worthy of patent (or that the terms were so outrageous cleanroom development of the same idea made sense).

Trade marks should probably be about as they are now in the US; a branding/logo enforcement for consumer protection. A possible exception would be a two-class system, one for 'Well known' brands and another for 'local' brands (You'd want to register in to the well known, but it'd cost more).

Back to copyrights: Even LIFETIME is insane, lifetime + 70 years is some kind of broken handout. Copyrights are about encouraging the production of /useful/ information. In todays far faster paced world if you haven't made your money in 10 years you're probably doing it wrong. Past that decade it should become part of public domain culture so that the future can be built instead of the past enshrined in tombs no one may enter within their lifetimes.